Another of Jo Walton’s wonderful blog posts about her travels. This time she attended a conference in Reno and got tangled up in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. No trains, no buses, no information or help from Amtrak or Greyhound. But unexpected help from fans from the conference and from random strangers. Here she is describing the final part of her trip home to Montreal.

Greyhound eventually said I could get home on Tuesday — but then after I’d paid them money and stood in line for an hour they revealed they didn’t actually have seats on any actual buses. That was when this story turned into magic realism, and a good example of how to travel hopefully. There was this old old Jewish guy who wanted to get to Montreal for a wedding. He wanted me to explain the situation that the Greyhound guys had just offhandedly explained to me. I did. He said he had a car. He had driven it from NYC, but he was too tired to drive it any further. Since the bus wouldn’t let us on, he was now looking for somebody to drive his car, with him in it, to Montreal. As you know I can’t drive, but we both wandered about the bus station getting into conversations until we found a random guy from San Francisco who could drive and was going to Montreal, and we all set off north from Albany.